Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Billionaires Are Reshaping US Politics w/ Jacob Silverman

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the politics of the PayPal Mafia tech billionaires, and how they’re trying to reshape US political discourse to serve themselves.Jacob Silverman is a journalist who writes for The New Republic, The Baffler, Slate, and many others. He’s also the co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with Ben McKenzie. Follow Jacob on Twitter at @SilvermanJacob.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Jacob wrote about Musk’s Twitter acquisition for The Baffler and the politics of David Sacks and these other tech billionaires for The New Republic.Paris wrote about Musk’s Twitter acquisition for NBC News and Marc Andreessen’s housing politics for Business Insider.The Delaware court case revealed text messages between Elon Musk and all the people trying to gain his favor.Saudi Arabia had an intelligence operation running through Twitter, which led some former employees to be charged with spying. Saudi Arabia has imprisoned people over their tweets.There were accusations that Twitter had an Indian official associated with the far-right Modi government on payroll.Banks are expecting to suffer major losses on the loans provided to Musk to acquire Twitter.The LA Times reported that Twitter bots helped build the cult of Musk.In 2016, Thiel and Sacks’ Diversity Myth comments were resurrected and Thiel has to issue a statement.Support the show

Yeah, it's hilarious in a way, but it also continues to be really gross. And, you know, you wonder, like, how long can they keep getting away with it? But they do because tech is still broadly admired in a lot of ways. And they're still rarely asked, like, how are you actually improving people's lives? Like, how are you actually contributing to the public good? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jacob Silverman. Jacob is back. You know, he's been on the show a couple of times before to talk about the crypto industry, but this time we're talking about something a little different. Just to remind you, if you don't remember, Jacob is the co-author of Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism and the Golden Age of Fraud with Ben McKenzie.

That will be out July of 2023, next year. It's available for pre-order now. And let me tell you, this is going to be the crypto book. So I highly recommend going and pre-ordering a copy or at least knowing that it's coming soon so you can be ready for it when it does come out. Jacob is also a journalist who writes for The New Republic, Slate, The Baffler, and plenty of other publications. Now, recently, he's written a couple of articles on Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition and David Sachs and the growing kind of right-wing politics of many of these tech billionaires who are influenced by Peter Thiel, associated with him, and the kind of politics that they are putting out into the world.

So since the US midterm elections are happening next week, I thought that this would be a good moment to have this conversation about the politics of these tech billionaires, you know, of Elon Musk as he's acquiring Twitter, but also of many of these other people who are putting these really right-wing narratives out into the world, who are putting a lot of money into elections on the federal level, you know, for various candidates like Blake Masters and JD Vance, but also putting money into the state level, into local level races to try to shape what politics is looking like and the kind of issues that are occupying the minds of the public. And this is important because in some cases, you know, people like Elon Musk or even David Sachs used to talk about being close to

the Democratic Party, in some cases donated to Democratic Party candidates, but now really feel that, you know, they are aligning themselves with a new right movement, with a Trumpist kind of politics that is picking up on real frustrations that people have, but then offering policy solutions, if there's much policy there at all, that really aren't going to solve the problem, but are just reactionary responses to these issues. And that, I would would argue would ultimately make these things worse, right? Obviously, this is a left wing podcast. I'm not endorsing any of these

people because I think that they're absolutely horrible. But it has been worrying to see, you know, a growing kind of group of people on the left who are increasingly associating themselves with some of these right wing figures with Fox News and Tucker Carlson and all these sorts of folks. So I think that we need to be aware of this. I think that we need to really investigate these politics and these ideas that are being put out by these really wealthy right-wing tech billionaires and to oppose it or push back on it wherever we can. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Jacob. I hope that you're really going to like it. There are some contentious issues in here. I will also note, just for people who are aware, we do talk about some sensitive

issues as well, like rape and homophobia and things like this, because these are issues that David Sachs and Peter Thiel have written about, have talked a lot about in the past. And so, you know, especially when we're talking about these kind of anti-woke politics that they are putting out there, it seemed necessary to dig back into that history and talk about the kinds of things that they have been interested in or obsessed about for quite a long time. So if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it.

And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week into having these critical conversations with experts like Jacob, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation. Jacob, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Glad to be here. Thank you. We're not talking about crypto this time, which is shocking. Maybe it will come up in our conversation. There's always an angle. Exactly, exactly.

There's always something to relate back to it. And who knows, maybe it will come up. But, you know, we're talking about something a little bit different than we usually talk about when you're on the show. But then again, it's very related, right? Because we talk about the right wing politics of crypto before when you've been on. And I think this is, to some degree, an extension of that when we're talking about the politics of a lot of these tech billionaires, what they're up to. You wrote this really great piece in the Baffler recently about Elon Musk's

purchase of Twitter, you know, something that we have been following for the past six months. As we record today, Thursday, October 27th, yesterday, Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters with a sink. You know, today he tweeted about his plans for advertisers and the rumor is tomorrow it's going to close. But, you know, I don't want to say for sure until that actually happens because of how many times this has been delayed. But what have you made of this whole saga? You know, everything that has happened over this past six months? Well, as with everything, Elon Musk, it's kind of silly and histrionic and centered around him and a little dumb at times. You know, he can't just acquire a company in a

normal way. It has to be this public event with a lot of sort of financial engineering behind it, too, because as most folks know, you know, he's highly leveraged. A lot of his money is tied up in Tesla. His meeting with bankers the other day where he supposedly told them, hey, this is going to be done by the end of the week. He was talking to people who are putting 13 billion. And so there is a lot of outside financing here. I think that's what might I mean, I was gonna say might keep him in check in some ways, but that's not even really, you don't want to paint the financiers as sort of authorities or heroes in any way, but kind of keep him perhaps from immediately blowing up the company. I think, you know, there is a lot of valid concern about where Twitter goes from here. One angle I've been

trying to take up to this point is to say that it's not necessarily that Musk is right, but Twitter does have a lot of problems, including bots even. But I don't think he's certainly the proper one to diagnose this stuff. And I think we've sometimes been distracted by Musk's apparent concerns about Twitter and not necessarily what some of the general ongoing issues are that were there before Musk and that will still be there. Yeah. You know, you discussed this really well in your piece, right? Discussing the Saudi intelligence operation that was going on inside Twitter, the lack of offices and, you know, content moderators and things like that, that Twitter

has, especially outside the English language in markets where it's used very heavily. But there isn't even nearly the degree of moderation that happens in English, which I think we already can recognize is often not good enough. And then when we look at what Elon Musk is proposing, his kind of focus, you know, he talks a lot about free speech, so to speak. You know, I think it's kind of up in the air as to what he really means by free speech. But he doesn't really seem to be clued into the real problems that the service has, but is rather motivated by, you know, particular things that he obsesses about and that the kind of people who he is associated with obsess about when it comes to this service? Very much so. I think he seems to be at least a little bit of a low attention span and is kind of easily distracted or motivated by something that one of his friends tells him, or even a tweet he encounters online. I mean, I thought the texts that were disclosed in the Delaware court were pretty interesting and probably points to one reason why he wanted

to wrap this thing up rather quickly after those came out, just because, you know, there could be worse to come. You know, I can't really speak definitively, but I spoke to one person who appears in those texts. And they said, Well, there are other texts for me that weren't there. So you know, I'm not going to sound conspiracy, but it's a partial picture into who he is and how he communicates with people. But I actually thought it was quite revealing. And yeah, he has all this, these hangers on and buddies around him or kind of versions of him, but far less wealthy. And they're making a lot of suggestions that one might expect and that one might see already on Twitter. You know, there is going to be some kind of regime governing speech on Twitter. The question is, what's that going to look like? I don't really know yet. But they do talk about like deplatforming political enemies

and some sort of conversation with an anonymous person that wasn't disclosed who it was in the court, and that they might hire someone like Blake Masters. So I think you have to say that a highly litigious billionaire, even if he wraps himself in the mantra of free speech, he may have a different idea of what that means than you or me. And I think there's certainly a way in which the right has embraced him in certain kind of like online free speech brigade. But I think it's either disingenuous or naive at best. The free speech issue is definitely something that matters. But it's also, of course, tied into these larger issues of content moderation and harassment on the platform and how, as Musk said in a letter he released today to advertisers, how do you make Twitter kind of a safe, welcoming space? It doesn't mean,

of course, that you have to make a very censorious one, but that's what the right seems to think. So those are issues that he's definitely gonna have to tackle and deal with. And then what I talked about in the baffler and elsewhere, and I think what's really overlooked is a broader sense of what free speech is and what security and safety and privacy mean for Twitter users, especially overseas. We can go through the whole Saudi issues, but there are two main things. There was a spy ring that ran inside of Twitter run by some Saudi officials who Jack still follows one of them on Twitter. And then a top prince owns about 5% of the company. And then there's the third factor, which is that at least a couple of times a month, there's someone arrested in Saudi Arabia for tweets that they make. And that one, I think, is actually sort of the overlooked part

of the whole Saudi relationship. It all matters. But if you are almost any kind of company and people were being regularly imprisoned for using your product, and ostensibly you stood for free speech, I mean, I think that's a real problem. Of course, Twitter is compromised in a lot of ways, including, you know, in sort of a political and financial sense in their relationship with Saudi Arabia. So we can be cynical about it and say, yeah, of course, they don't say anything. But it's a real problem. And it calls out for sort of an ethical and moral response from the company.

But of course, they're in no position to do that. They just they almost never say anything. I think also journalists need to start calling up Twitter more when this kind of thing happens. Yeah, there's a real tension in what you described there, right? Because on one hand, Elon Musk talks about this idea of free speech that is very much pulling from this kind of, you know, obsession with wokeism from, you know, the right wing that that is going on right now that we're all very familiar with. But then on the other hand, he talks about how, you know, he's still going to abide by the laws of various countries. So for thinking about somewhere like Saudi Arabia, that can be pretty concerning, right? Especially if Saudi Arabia has influence

in the company itself. And I wanted to talk a bit about the politics, right? Because there's one part of this whole six months that's revealed a lot about Twitter, about the discussions that we have about Twitter, you know, about its problems and how we're not focusing on the right problems. But then on the other hand, I feel like Musk has become much more open about his own personal politics and who he associates with through this period. And in the Baffler piece, I just want to quote something that you wrote. You said, Musk is no longer a carnival barker like industrialists profiting off of hyped up public enthusiasm and government largesse. Instead, he's emerged as a dangerous kind of power broker, impossibly rich, amoral, full of empty, technophilic promises, promising lawfare against his enemies and able to manipulate

asset prices and headlines in a tweet. So do you want to expand on that and talk a bit about what, you know, this whole process has revealed to us about Musk and, you know, I guess the relationship that he has with us, with the public, with society, I don't know, even broadly. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think looking at him as some kind of industrialist kind of helps us just as a basic model of framing. I mean, he has lots of interests. He's obviously, by some measures, the richest person in the world, but he has lots of interest in various industries and around the world. So whenever he's trying to do business anywhere, I mean, just look up, you know, his famous tweet when he was saying he was going to take Tesla private for 420 bucks per share, you know, stupid weed joke, that kind of thing. But he said he has funding from Saudi Arabia. I mean, and obviously, he has issues

with China and manufacturing there, and it's a big market for him. Just like anywhere you turn, he has potential political entanglements, certainly abroad. And here he's a big client in the U.S. government. I mean, there are national security concerns on behalf of the U.S. government, some of the stuff he does. So that sort of entanglement of relationships and varying incentives, I think is actually pretty important. And even people who might essentially be must supporters should probably think about like, this guy has his hands in a lot of pies, and he doesn't seem to have very firm principles. I mean, to me, he is sort of an amoral rich guy with the kind of reactionary,

I don't like where things are going nature that is, I think, found a lot in tech and especially in his circle and in PayPal mafia types. So, you know, he stands for this general idea of innovation and exploration and stuff like that. But politically, I don't think he really has any firm principles. I actually admit I haven't spent a lot of time looking at his donations, but, you know, he's not really known much as a political donor. And a lot of these guys are really just, you know, they have their ideologies generally leaned towards the right, but they also put their money where they think they might get them something. So I think that's important to realize. Musk is a global political and business player for better and worse, probably mostly for

worse. And that really influences where Twitter fits in his empire and how he might treat a serious issue at Twitter. I mean, for example, before, based on whistleblower testimony and some reporting, it seems as if Twitter hired some sort of Indian government official or agent of the Modi regime to work at Twitter. You have to think that this kind of thing is going on elsewhere. I mean, there's been accusations that there was a Chinese spy on the Twitter payroll, you know, knowingly and unknowingly. I mean, I think they're probably people with connections to US intelligence. I mean, certainly we know there are former people from intelligence working for these companies. So those kinds of decisions are

pretty important. And if you're so compromised and entangled and have varying and competing priorities, I don't see how you can really be a responsible steward of this company. The other thing I think we might want to get into at some point, or that comment you read was alluding to, is this idea that Twitter is not just a website that a lot of people use or kind of an also-ran social media site. I actually wonder how it might change in its relationship with sort of mainstream media or me and all the addicted journalists. Will we not trust as much? But more importantly, it is sort of this, I almost call it an intelligence service of sorts. I mean, he's just going to have a lot of access to data, to news as it happens, to consumer sentiment, to DMs if he wants to. I mean, it's not to say that

the current regime or Jack might not have done these kinds of things before. But, you know, Musk is associated with kind of financial engineering, potential stock manipulation, Doge pump and dumps like he will be able to do that if he really wants to. And he can do it through cutouts or ways in which it won't really be traced back to him. So I want us to get to the broader politics. But I think that's a really important point, right? Because there's a question about what Twitter actually looks like in a Musk world, right? Because we know that he's buying it at $44 billion, the original valuation, even though the whole tech economy has kind of gone into a tailspin since that happened. As you said, he's already very leveraged. A lot of his money is tied up in Tesla. And if he pulls too much from it, then that threatens Tesla's valuation as well. There's a lot of these banks and financiers who got into it who seem not super happy that they have to finance it at this valuation. It looks, he's taking it private, but I'm sure he won't want to have it lose money indefinitely. He's

talked about ways that he might want to see new modernization techniques that he wants to pursue in order to make it more financially viable because Twitter, you know, traditionally has not really made money at all or, you know, just small amounts of money. And so, you know, Twitter, for better or worse, does play this important role in how many key sectors communicate online. Sure, it's not used by the broader public in a way that Facebook is, but there's a lot of journalists who use it. There's a lot of politicians who use it. There's a lot of activists who use it and things like that, right? So there's a lot of kind of, I guess, relatively important discourse that happens there. And then so what happens if, you know, Elon Musk comes in, starts to make these changes, starts to make the platform less appealing

to people to still be there in the way that they have? You know, what does that mean for all those discussions? But also, what does it mean for Musk himself, who has really benefited from the way that Twitter has helped to elevate his status and his position and place him really in the center of a lot of these discussions? Yeah, that last part especially is a good point. The status quo is actually, as you say, has been really good for Musk. I mean, the LA Times and elsewhere, I think it's done reporting about how obviously Musk has built up his cult on social media, but also there've been a lot of bots and kind of other potential information operations or platform manipulation is a term I'm sort of trying to embrace, but that goes on seemingly in relation to his account, or, I mean, he's probably the most impersonated person on Twitter,

you know, and that's not to say he's doing that or someone from his company, but the messy version of Twitter that he's inheriting has actually done really well for him. I was a little shocked when I heard that he might cut 75% of staff. It sounds like that's not happening. You never really know, of courseat, but there are a lot of things it needs to do better. And there already was a major whistleblower like a month ago that was warning us of all these basic issues around privacy, security, how data is managed. And then I'm here shouting about Saudi users being arrested and things like that. Like, it's a pretty dark scene he's entering already. I think the question is, what happens if it becomes less appealing, if it stops being the newswire for much of the media, stops being the place where news really breaks? And it's not to say that Twitter is essential, but it is, for better or worse, important, and it occupies a certain role. It doesn't have nearly the user base of a number

of other services. But if Twitter somehow kind of falls into even further disrepair and disuse and doesn't play that kind of driving role in the media ecosystem, it's not necessarily for the better if that market share or that role just gets subsumed by TikTok or something else. I'm not really a fan of creative disruption, but maybe there is a chance to kind of rethink at least or think about what one would want out of Twitter, out of the digital public sphere, which I know some media scholars don't really like that term, but we sort of have the systems and tools we have. And for better or worse, Twitter is that. It's where a lot of these conversations are happening and what is really driving a lot of news coverage. So it could get

even messier, of course. And he has certain incentives. Once he privatizes it, he can kind of do whatever he wants. Like right now, they don't really want to deal with the bot problem, I think, because it drives up engagement. And to admit it would be to say, like, a lot of our users actually aren't even here. Once you take the company private, I don't know, he doesn't have his disclosure requirements. No one's trying to really buy it from him right away. He can kind of clean house both personnel wise and on the platform and reconfigure whatever he wants and then present it to new buyers or in a new IPO a couple years from now and say, look, I made you a new better Twitter.

Will we really know what that is even or what it looks like under the hood? I don't even know. I mean, I talk to people who say Twitter now and they're like, this thing is rife with platform manipulation. Certainly, if you cover crypto, you just see scams and spam all the time, including with verified accounts and things like that. But it's kind of like every intelligence service in the world practically is running some sort of information operation on Twitter. It doesn't mean that they're convincing lots of people, but there is, you know, there's a lot of manipulative activity going on, including

the advertising. So I think we have to think about that as sort of the spectrum of manipulation, the various kinds of activities that are happening on Twitter platform, the lack of policing in some form or another, at least transparency, and how there's just potential for all that to get worse once Musk is fully in the driver's seat. Well, we're just moving from Twitter through to X, right? That's going to be the next iteration of Twitter, where we're going to have all these other great features as well that we're going to love. And that's going to be so amazing, like a Chinese WhatsApp. Yeah, I mean, I can kind of see him just throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks

and like saying, oh, saying yes. Oh, yeah, put crypto in, you know, oh, let's get Dogecoin in, of course, you know, a lot of just sort of random monetization efforts or, you know, hiring influencers to post content, even though they already do. I mean, that was one of the suggestions in the text that were disclosed. And that's the problem, I think, with Twitter is that it doesn't really have any easy way out towards sustained profitability and growth of the kind that's expected by venture capitalists and investors. You know, Twitter might actually be better, of course, as a public utility, I think of some sort, or at least with like kind of a cooperative model or some form of public shared ownership. But also, it might also be at least better than the status quo as kind of a loss leader for someone or someone who's at least, you know, Musk says he feels some sort of

sense of responsibility or stewardship. I don't really believe that's true. But perhaps there is someone who has a little more, we can put a little more good faith in that way. But, you know, that's not going to happen right now. But in terms of what we want out of kind of these future platforms, I think it's certainly a reminder that we need other ownership models, because it's just being passed to another billionaire and his other financier backers, who are all friends with the last ownership group, pretty much. Yeah. And I think that we can certainly recognize that, you know, whatever happens next, it looks like this is going to happen. I think it will be certainly interesting, at least,

to see what happens with Twitter, whether it falls apart under Musk's leadership, whether, you know, we eventually move to some other platform or this just all, you know, implodes and who knows what's going to happen. But I do want to move to a bigger picture, right? Because we've been talking about Musk and Twitter and, you know, some of the right wing ideas that have influenced the discourse that he has been engaging in on what the future of Twitter should look like. But this is linked to, you know, something that that is much broader that's going on now with tech billionaires, Musk included, that they're engaging in, that they are pushing forward. And you also wrote a piece recently for the New Republic about David Sachs, and he's probably a

tech billionaire that people are less familiar with. I feel like he doesn't have the kind of public profile, maybe at least outside of certain groups, that someone like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel has, right? So who is David Sachs? And how does he fit into this whole conversation? Sure. He's a very wealthy tech executive and investor. Right now, he runs a company called Craft Ventures, which is his VC firm. And he's also known as the co-founder of a site called Colin, which is a podcasting website. He's certainly worth the hundreds of millions, maybe a billionaire. I don't think his net worth has been publicly disclosed. He's also has alluded to being a big crypto holder, especially of Solana. There's an infamous clip from his podcast that he does with three other VCs where they,

they basically talk about how they have hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars worth of Solana at the time that they all bought at a discount. But anyway, he started in the early to mid nineties, actually at Stanford, he met Peter Thiel and they started writing together. They became basically writing partners. They wrote op-eds, they both were part of kind of a larger kind of counter-revolution or reaction, I would say, to the 60s generation of Stanford and the previous kind of lefty, hippie generation of Stanford. And there were, by that time, a lot of people who didn't care for that or who were kind of rebelling against the vestiges of that, which sometimes were shown in kind of in some of the professors who traced back to that time,

but also new efforts to be kind of multiculturalism was a big bogey word for them to be perhaps more embrace diversity and progressive values and things like that. So this was a big deal for him, these efforts at multiculturalism and diversity at Stanford, to him and Thiel. And Thiel started something called the Stanford Review, which was a political magazine, conservative, basically. And then later on, they wrote a bunch of pieces for different newspapers, mainstream papers, Wall Street Journal, National Review, stuff like that. And then they wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. And The Diversity Myth has become sort of notorious because, I mean, they brush off rape really as a problem or certainly as an epidemic on college campuses. And then there's some stuff where they basically write that date rape is a vestige on the books

of another era. And it's just there's something about some rape accusations or belated regret. There's just a lot of minimization of rape, frankly. And the book came up again in 2016 when Ryan Mack, who's a great reporter now at the New York Times, he was writing for Forbes. He went through it and pulled out some of those quotes about rape. And, you know, again, this is something that they had written about a number of times. I mean, for the Stanford Review, they had something called the rape issue. And they wrote about this stuff several times. And then in the book, finally, and the reason why I'm going into a lot of detail about this is because this all prefigures today and arguments over wokeism and kind of reactionary discourse today. But you just kind of sub out

multiculturalism for woke and you get a lot of what's happening today. And they thought men were being vilified and that sort of thing. So they released this book. It was a lot of what's happening today. And they thought men were being vilified and that sort of thing. So they released this book. It was a bit of a sensation among sort of conservative right cultural warrior set. It then went away. They apologized for some of the rape stuff in 2016. But you go back through the book and it does reflect, I think, a lot of troubling ideas. From there, anyway, founding COO of PayPal, executive COO at Yammer and Zenefits, which is credited with turning around Zenefits, and then really now VC,

Colin founder, and increasingly a big political donor. There are a number of things that I could pick up on what you just said, and I think that we'll dig into a number of them. But just going back to that period at Stanford, they're also associated with a group, you know, you talk about what they're writing about multiculturalism, about rape. There's also an incident where some of the people who they're associated with, I believe at the Stanford Review, are, you know, yelling homophobic slurs. And, you know, there's a whole kind of dust up around that. Like, there's a really particular politics there that you can see in that moment, as you're saying,

that seems now kind of reflected, or there's elements of it that you can pick up on right now. These similar kind of politics that are repeating themselves, or at least there's echoes of them that are relevant in what these people are promoting today. What do you make of that? seem quite important as the same sort of people who are associated with Teal back in the day are now also associated with pushing this kind of anti-woke politics, this kind of new right politics and all these sorts of things. Yeah, I think again, I mean, I was on the majority report recently and Sam Sater made some connections to Pat Buchanan, early 90s culture warring, paleo cons, and that is sort of some of their attitude. And I think you mix that with kind of trolling, I would say, and also just this attitude like people shouldn't be offended by things. Minorities or marginalized folks are generally the creators of their own

victimization. There's a lot of that kind of thing in the book itself. And I think you hear a lot of that now that actually by focusing on racism too much, we're creating more division. And that's pretty much a line from the diversity myth. And you hear that kind of thing today, too, that the problems aren't the problem. You know, racism or bigotry is not a problem. It's the obsessive focus on it and elevation of kind of trivial examples into something else. I mean, I certainly disagree with that. But that's kind of the ethos or the guiding philosophy. And it is based on, frankly, in a lot of like white male resentment, I think, and unhappiness, that kind of changing world and changing values. But that seems to be the style.

Sacks himself on Twitter lately complains a lot about the woke mob. I mean, frankly, like, if you have more than 50,000 followers or whatever, and you're saying anything remotely contentious, you're going to get a lot of people responding to you. So like, there's always going to be a woke mob in David Sachs's mind or even on his timeline. But I think that's sort of the attitude that we're seeing is that they're still sort of the rational guys in the room. I mean, in the early 90s, they were writing about defending Western civilization. Now you hear that on the alt-right, for sure. You don't really hear that from Teal or Sachs. But this sense of that tradition is under assault, that there are ways to kind of do things, and that an obsession with identity, especially, has really harmed societal unity and kind of our

politics. You both have that now, and certainly 30 years ago when they were writing. Yeah, it's fascinating as well, because there's also this kind of focus on the college campus and what's going on there. And you see that today, you see that back in that period, you see it even earlier, there were obsessions about this then. Yeah, back to William F. Buckley and stuff like that, yeah. Exactly, exactly.

You just see these things repeat over and over. It's a strange thing to me too sometimes, because like, I don't know, I went to college in the US and there were political activities at school. And I wasn't, to be honest, I wasn't that politically involved. I mean, I was just sort of sitting there in outrage at the Bush administration, but I didn't do much, but there were battles going on on campus and stuff like that. But I went to Emory School in Georgia, but I never really saw a university or campus as such a battleground. And I think a lot of college students don't necessarily. I don't want to generalize too much.

But, you know, there's a way for a lot of culture warriors and people in politics or columnists looking for material like the latest absurd thing to come out of Oberlin or Stanford or Columbia or wherever is a call to man the battlements and to help defend free speech from these impetuous youngsters who just don't get it. And you seem to, yeah, you do seem to have that. It seems to be almost evergreen in kind of this culture warring stuff. Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, there's a particular coming back to the present and what we're looking at now, you start off your piece in the New Republic by discussing the case of the former district attorney of San Francisco, who was really attacked for having a more progressive approach toward crime and these kind of issues, and people like David Sachs really picking up on it and funding a campaign to have him

removed from that position, to have him recalled, I believe the right word is in American politics. Can you talk a bit about that whole know, that whole situation, what it reveals about the politics of these billionaires, but also more broadly, you know, I guess what is going on in California and in American politics? Sure. So, you know, the 90s stuff I talk about to kind of say where they came from and to kind of diagram this lineage and everything like that. But what's really important, of course, is to see what are they doing now. And now the important thing is that people like Sachs are putting their money behind their ideas. And there's a lot of money going from Thiel and Sachs and other people kind of in the PayPal mafia network, including from

Keith Rabois, I believe is how you say his last name, the guy who helped yell those homophobic slogans at Stanford, who you referred to earlier, they said he was testing the bounds of free speech. Anyway, so now that they're kind of putting their money where their mouth is, because they're all extremely rich, these Stanford and PayPal buddies, who have really ascended to places of tremendous prominence in the industry and in politics. I mean, there are charts out there about how many companies came out of PayPal. And there's a lot. And they're pretty much all started by a small number of white men. You know, the YouTube guys were not white, they were men, and they came from PayPal, too. But pretty much everyone early PayPal, who's gone to be one of these very influential tech industrialists is a white man, a number of them are from South Africa.

So California is really the epicenter of all this stuff, San Francisco, of course, there's a sense among the tech elite, I'd say, and also some disenchanted Democrats that Democratic governance has failed. Sort of small D Democrat, but also certainly big D, the Democratic Party, that it's become too woke, too indulgent in identity politics. And if you look at people's material day-to-day lives, they're worse. I mean, a lot of stuff is maybe true. I mean, certainly the material difference in people's lives. And yes, there's horrible issues with homelessness and drug use and sort of other social misery in, of how politics has gone. But then the question is, what is the response, right? What is the set of policies that you're going to promote as the way that we address these questions? And there, there seems to be quite a division

between what people like Sachs are pushing, who are more associated with this Republican Party. But then there's also a divide on the left that I want to get into in a minute, because you discuss it in the piece, around what the solution is here as well, because there's a growing division there where there are a bunch of people who would say that they identify with the left who seem to be closer and closer to David Sachs and this kind of political approach. Right. So Sachs and other folks like him, sometimes they pay a little lip service to criminal justice reform and, you know, they are upset by open air drug use or

homelessness. But to be honest, you hear very little sympathy for, say, the homeless people themselves who are often the victims of crime. And there's much more sort of a draconian and criminalization attitude towards this stuff where the cops need to come in and do something and kind of restore order. And this is linked to the fact that homelessness itself, especially encampments, have been increasingly criminalized in places like Los Angeles and other parts of California. There's a sense that homelessness is only going to be treated as a criminal problem and that it's inherently disruptive and suspect and that our cities need to be kind of rescued or taken back from homelessness and crime and open air drug use. And the Democrats have failed us. So there are sort of political attitudes that don't come with much policy, frankly, and that don't come people show empathy towards other kinds of crime victims, like violent crime victims, or when when someone does get attacked by a homeless person, you see a lot of right wingers on YouTube up in arms about it or on Twitter or wherever else,

but very little attention paid to how did this problem develop? We know if you read even most basic research that providing people actual housing is probably one of the biggest differentiators you can make to make a positive difference here, that we need to liberalize drug laws, all these sorts of things. But there's a sense that either those things have already been tried and failed, or that we just don't have the time, it doesn't scale or something like that. And so there's a real resentment towards both the status quo and also these progressive DAs and other progressive criminal justice types who are coming in. So that's what's happening in California. They recalled Chesa Boudin, the progressive DA, who frankly wasn't a great communicator, but he kind of was doing what he said he was going to do. Whether his't always know where it comes from or where it goes. But there was a lot of money put

into casting him as the sole kind of responsible force for San Francisco's disrepair. And then what's worth pointing out, though, is they've been trying this a lot. So the recall and political spending is basically the main toolkit for people like Sachs. He put a lot of money to try to recall Gavin Newsom, the governor, and support one of his challengers who was very anti-homeless. There's not really another way to put it. And people have tried to recall Gascon, the DA in LA, who's considered somewhat progressive. Now there's an effort to impeach Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Actually, after my article came out, I was hearing from people who work in the city in San Francisco or for the city or in education there. And I think there's a general

sense really, they're starting to tell me about another education issue outside the city somewhere else. I don't have the name handy, but where a lot of outside tech money was flowing in, including from people don't even live there. So I think the overall picture here is that there's a lot of money flowing in to kind of manipulate the legal system and the political system. And people who are locals and part of this sometimes feel that it's slipping beyond their control. Certainly people in the education system who I talked to say, we don't feel like we have much say in this anymore. Like, yeah, there are issues in San Francisco, and we need to fix things. But it's now just in the hands of well moneyed interests. And then there are also a lot of people who are understandably upset with what's happened there and see the anger that Sachs

is trying to project and also trying to bring in disenchanted Democrats and say, OK, at least there's someone who's reflected my anger. Let's recall the people in office now and try something else. Yeah, it's it's absolutely fascinating to see play out, right? Absolutely concerning as well to see the influence that they can wield and how they've been effective in, you know, kind of crafting or at least echoing and spreading this narrative around crime and homelessness and all these sorts of things. It's all about the fear of crime and cities are dead. And, you know, of course, you can trace it to some racist underpinnings, especially cities that happen to have large Black and other minority populations. And, you know, the urban core being seen as this fearsome place. You know, there's a regular Twitter post of, you know, I used to be a Democrat, but then I went around the Upper East Side and I felt so scared. And we kind of have seen this percolating through the culture and this conception that there is

some kind of crime epidemic. I mean, there's sometimes bad data. It's how you interpret it. Some forms of crime are up. Certainly crime in general, especially violent crime, is much lower than it was 30 years ago in most American cities. But they are really giving up on the city, on kind of multicultural democratic governance. They say, and you'll hear this in the Peter Thiel gave a speech recently at a conservative conference where he talked about this, that Austin, Texas and Miami are kind of the last hopes for them. You know, we've heard for the last couple of years how people are leaving San Francisco for Austin, Elon Musk is in Texas, Dell and all these other companies are already there. And of course, it's because Texas and Florida have no income tax, and they don't mind Governor Abbott. They really like

DeSantis. David Sachs has donated a bunch of money to DeSantis. One of his co-hosts on his podcast, Chamath, he's donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think actually a million dollars to a DeSantis PAC. So that's kind of the horse they're riding. And they're just hoping that the problems of urban governance don't follow them to these other cities that have serious issues surrounding them, including the climate, but also don't have income tax and have their own history of poor governance. And now the real estate prices are skyrocketing as they are in most American cities. So, you know, that's where you have to ask, like, what are you actually doing to fix this

stuff? Thiel seemed to acknowledge this in his speech at this conservative convention last month. He talked about needing a more positive agenda, but no one has it. I make fun of the Marc Andreessen thing, it's time to build because he's the it's time to build guy, but he's a nimbyist. And he just invests in crypto companies that don't make anything. But, you know, none of these guys actually talk about like building more housing, or finding more affordable solutions or redistribution of resources. Of course, they never will. But they're obviously so trapped in their ideology and their monetary self-interest that they are reproducing the problems that they kind of left behind in their supposed last redoubts of Austin

and Miami. But Jacob, Adam Neumann is going to solve the whole housing crisis now, haven't you heard? It's disgusting that they're just sort of financializing and cryptifying and arbitraging on top of housing. I mean, which is obviously such an essential need and has become impossibly expensive for people. Yeah, it's hilarious in a way, but it also continues to be really gross. And, you know, you wonder, like, how long can they keep getting away with it? But they do because tech is still broadly admired in a lot of ways. And they're still rarely asked, like, how are you actually improving people's lives? Like, how are you actually contributing to the public good? Like,

or Elon Musk, how are you going to actually preserve Twitter in the public interest? And we never really get good answers. I mean, that guy Lerone Shapiro has had some funny tweets about how he seems to collect videos of Web3 VCs unable to say really what the use cases are. And we rarely even get to that point, much less beyond it. Like these people have kind of coasted on reputation and money and authority and presumed competence for so long, but they're leaving a trail of wreckage in a lot of ways, I think. Yeah. And of course, one of the most beautiful cases is watching Mark Zuckerberg fail enormously. It's astonishing. I hadn't realized to some extent just the degree.

I mean, I knew the stock was crashing and that they're spending a lot of money, but something like 15 billion this year, like basically because one guy wants to create a bad video game. Yeah. Very expensive video game. But, you know, I want to pick up on that point, right? Because in the New Republic piece you wrote, and I quote, in the eyes of rich techies who have seen their beloved metropolis fall into decay, vast inequality and social misery, the state is dead. Their disappointment and alienation has melded with traditional Republican disgust toward liberal cities and their non-white residents to paint a picture of irredeemable urban squalor. These frightened urbanites are echoing the Trumpist drumbeat that cities, particularly in California,

are dangerous, dark places that must be tamed. You know, that's what you were talking about there. But, you know, when I read that, I couldn't help but then think they're identifying these problems with cities. They're identifying, you know, how cities have been unable to address these severe social problems that exist within them, especially in these Californian cities that have been really wealthy, that have benefited a lot in recent decades. You know, there was news the other day that it looks like California is going to overtake Germany and be like the fourth largest economy in the world if you separate it out from the United States. So like it's massive, it's very wealthy, but it hasn't been able to address these problems. And then you think about why that is. And it's, you know, in part because of the neoliberal governance, the slashing of taxes

that has really benefited people like Sachs and Musk and Thiel because they haven't had to pay as much taxes. They haven't had to contribute to public services. So cities and states and federal governments have not been able to provide them. That has created these severe social inequities and social issues, the homelessness, all these sorts of things. And they certainly will never admit that this is the actual problem, right? How we've reoriented government and the state to serve the needs, the benefits, the desires of these fabulously wealthy tech billionaires and other wealthy people, of course, beyond them. Yeah, like, you know, that will never be admitted. Instead, it's these racist issues and it's wokeism and all these sorts of things

that are the problem. Well, and I think also there's this assumption that we sort of like come to the end of the road politically or so, you know, it's the end of history or something like that. And it's a real bummer because, you know, politics is messy and hard and pretty dysfunctional in the U.S., but a lot of the solutions, I mean, if they can be agreed upon, aren't mysterious, you know, like people need housing or, and this is what's really frustrating when, whenever Elon Musk, and certainly as someone who's written heavily about transport, you get this, like, you know, whenever he talks about the hyperloop and some mayor of a midsize American city says, oh yeah, come show us in Vegas or whatever else.

Like, it's not just like a distraction on the internet for a few days or something that a lot of people write about. Like it consumes resources. People start thinking that's a solution, a city might actually invest in a pilot study or something like that, when public transport, expensive as it can be to build, has been available and known about and studied and used in very familiar and time-tested forms for 100 years. I mean, and things are getting even better if we are able to, you know, devote our resources, that kind of stuff. I mean, they're infamously recently, there was an article about, I think,

in the New York Times about California dropping the ball on high speed rail. There was a little bit of a almost racist joke, but something about the company then went to Morocco, where it was easier to do business, you know, like, because everyone might think that Morocco's sort of has corruption or something like that. But like, I. But that shows that the problems aren't really with high-speed rail or same, whether it's except for the Defense Department, which is always good. So that's what's really frustrating to me. There's no notion. There's no conception that, hey, maybe we could refurbish some of our institutions. Maybe we could replace some. Maybe there are other solutions out there and we just simply haven't really tried them

because there's so much greed and self-interest at play and because our politics have become so dysfunctional. So I think that's one kind of discussion that needs to be had and maybe a conceptual leap that kind of needs to be made is that like, we don't need innovators necessarily to rescue us from this stuff. We certainly need some political movement and hopefully, you know, better political leaders, which of course is a depressing prospect. But, you know, there's kind of no way but through except some form, I think, of political struggle. And one last thing I'll say on that is that's what kind of gets me a little frustrated about, say, these rich guys who are donating a lot of money to recalls. I mean, the day or day after

of the successful Boudin recall, Sachs went on Tucker Carlson, who he seems to be pretty in line with. And Tucker Carlson credited him with making democracy possible. You know, there's this idea that like, he was representing the popular democratic will, which was discussed with Boudin. I mean, certainly Boudin had some opposition, just as with the school board recall, there was genuine opposition, especially among Asian Americans in San Francisco, from what I understand. But, you know, there's still this billionaire astroturfing effort going into these things. And to say that like a largely billionaire funded recall campaign is somehow enabling democracy is the opposite of what's true. But it's, it's the classic right wing and even MAGA

bait and switch about what's populism now. And Sachs calls himself a populist now too. So I think we need to actually like think about what power is and how it should be exercised. And also how we fix these things. And it's not going to be because Elon Musk like innovates a cheaper tent city or something like that. Or, you know, some bricks from the tunnels to build affordable housing, right? But you know, you're talking about the politics there. And this is something that really comes up in the piece and that has been kind of, you know, out in the discussion for a while. And that's that, you know, we have these people who are ostensibly on the left who are increasingly aligning themselves with this kind of right wing movement, this kind

of right wing politics as well, that's being pushed by people like Saks, that's obsessed with woke culture and all these sorts of things, whether it's, you know, the sub stack bros like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, you know, that sort of approach to things. But then there's more of these people who are going on the call-in platform, which is co-founded by Saks, as you said, and funded by Peter Thiel, even to talk about issues like the Boudin recall, which is a bit odd. But then we've also seen these kind of talking points be picked up by what I would say are even more, you know, mainstream left-wing media outlets like The Young Turks, which has really been hitting on the homelessness and crime stuff recently. So what do you make of this kind of, I guess, growing relationship

between these two approaches to politics and, I guess, the worrying path that that seems to be on? Yeah, I think those trends are what I'm observing. You know, just to talk about Colin first, not everyone on that platform is the same. And I've talked to people who are, you know, of the left and I'm not trying to do some purity tests, but there are people who were brought to that platform, because they got contracts or recruited, but people in general, who might be called post left or contrarian, I mean, at least according to the analytics website I use, the person David Sachs retweets most is Glenn Greenwald, who's on Colin, though, lately, he's had some family stuff and hasn't been posted in there. But, you know, Matt Taibbi, and some of these other people, Jesse Single, Aaron Mate, folks like that, you know, and Matt Taibbi and some of these other people, Jesse Singel, Aaron Maté, folks like that, you know, Jimmy Dore, people who kind of represent a certain

disenchantment with liberalism itself, or with certainly with the Democratic Party, which again, I think often has a solid foundation. I mean, you know, I critique the Democratic Party from the left and kind of a typical leftist sense, perhaps I don't claim to be very heterodox, but it's similar in that there's this profound disenchantment, I think, and cynicism that a lot of people feel. And it's sort of like, well, what are you going to do about it? And again, this lack of kind of charity towards homeless folks in terms of sympathy and generosity and tying that in with the crime issue and kind of just seeing it as all a sense of like politicians have failed us and urban disorder, again, without real any sense of traditional kind of liberal sympathies,

I'd say, for a lot of the people wrapped up in these horrible situations or horrible systems. So I also think it plays well on social media, frankly. I think some people believe it, but some people do it because it gets you a big reaction when you court controversy in any way. Or you say like, Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks said yesterday he was going to vote for Rick Caruso, who's, you know, the kind of Republican billionaire property developer who represents, I think, the LA version of some of this stuff. He's not a techie, but he's a former Republican. He's a billionaire. He's a bit of a reactionary. He calls himself a Democrat now, but he's certainly pretty draconian on crime and homelessness and things like that. So, and he said he was basically just sick of things and the Democratic Party needed to

shake up. Again, we're not really getting anywhere positive here or even here entertaining positive solutions. It does come from a real disenchantment and anger that I think can kind of border on nihilism. I mean, it's funny, I'm quoting Peter Thiel so much, but I actually thought in some ways his speech, I don't think his speech was that great, but there were some interesting notes in it at that NatCon that I've been referring to, where he referred to something called nihilistic negation, I think is what he said, that Republicans do. And that's sort of the constant obstructionism, I think, that Mitch McConnell is a master of, and sort of traditional Republican Party.

But it's also this new right MAGA, just anger and politics of peak and anti-woke, just leave me the hell alone. I don't even want to see a homeless person outside the door to the Twitter office when I have to go to work and make 250 grand. So that's where I see it kind of settling. And why I think, I don't know if I say I understand why it's attracted to people putatively on the left, but I think I see that's where they're coming from at least. And it does get a response. I mean, a lot of people are upset and it's not like it's a popular thing to say like,

oh, give them houses or seize the empty homes in New York, of which there are many, empty luxury apartments and stuff. But people who want to have a more positive solution to stuff or people on the left do have an obligation to kind of organize for that and bring that forward. But also, you don't have to be naive or ignorant and say, like, we've tried everything. Yeah, no, I think it's really well said. And I think it's been concerning to see this increasing move in this direction that, as you say, is based in something concrete, something that makes sense. You know, there's a real serious problem with American politics, with Western politics, with its orientation, with the liberalism that has kind of consumed it, that has kind of dominated it people in a direction that doesn't seem very

productive and seems kind of obsessed with some of these issues like woke culture and whatnot that aren't really pushing us in a positive direction into getting things done and are pushing more and more people toward the politics of people like Thiel, like Musk, like David Sachs and whoever, which seems particularly concerning if you think about the future and where things could be going down the road. I wanted to ask you about Thiel, right? Because we've talked about Musk, we've talked about Sachs. Thiel has kind of come up in this discussion, but his influence seems quite important because he's at the center of the Stanford Review back in the day. And certainly I talked to Moira Weigel about his history a few months ago. But the PayPal mafia, this group of people who's at PayPal, as you were describing,

who come out of it, who have a lot of influential companies, tech companies that get founded, who go on to become quite rich, seem to be playing a really important role in what is happening in the politics right now in trying to shape that in deploying money to try to influence electoral contests and whatnot. You know, what do you make of the influence that Thiel has in this whole sphere? To what degree do these other, you know, rich folks kind of follow on what he is already doing? Well, I think he does have a lot of influence. I mean, certainly he's very wealthy and powerful and connected. It's funny. I mean, I remember like five years ago or longer, perhaps pre-Trump, Teal's, some of his investments and his hedge fund

were doing very badly, but, you know, Palantir has endured and Palantir is also just a very influential vehicle for him because he's, is an intelligence state and social security state contractor, but he still remains very rich and politically connected. And he's the one who I think has shown the most kind of ideological and political commitment of this group. But now you see people coming to the fore like Sachs, who's always been politically interested, I think, and active, but who's now donating a lot of money and sometimes at the urging reportedly of Teal. Sachs gave about a million dollars to J.D. Vance's PAC right before Trump publicly endorsed J.D. Vance.

Both of those things, the endorsement and the money were reportedly brokered by Teal. So he's sort of a model, but in a way, he's kind of a dilettante. Like he seems to lose interest sometimes. There was some reporting a month or two ago that he may not be as excited about Vance and Masters. And he was clashing with McConnell. McConnell basically said to him, like, well, you put these guys on the ballot, you might as well help put them over the finish line with more money. And he was sort of, I don't know if I want to. But he was also very in early on Trump. And he stayed with Trump and gave him more money when almost no one was.

So he has a certain kind of savvier luck of ending up on the side of power, certainly. And I mean, one thing we haven't really talked about is foreign policy. That's what Sachs has gotten known for lately. And because he talks a lot about Ukraine, and he's basically anti-US intervention, very MAGA isolationist. Actually, when I was on the majority report, they made a reference to Bircherism, which is John Bircher, which is John Bircher Society, which is not that far off in a way. It's like a very America first. It is a real emphasis on like, why do we need to interfere with another country when we've got all these problems here that aren't necessarily a quarter of our interests. But it also is sort of opportunistic, I would say.

And, you know, it is informed by 20 years of disastrous warfare or more since 9-11. But it's hard to feel like the people, especially in the MAGA crowd or in Sachs and Thiel's milieu, who claim hesitance about Ukraine now, would have been doing the same, you know, about Iraq or Afghanistan 15 years ago. And of course, like that perceived kind of restraint or perhaps even preference for diplomacy or other liberal practices and virtues, I don't think really extends to their domestic policy, which again, I think is very cruel in some ways and libertarian competition-based, highly capitalistic, almost corporatists, or in Teal's

case, fascists. Teal has said that he thinks the US should have a dictator. He's not really a fan of democracy. He's written somewhat fancifully, if you want to be charitable about it, but that women shouldn't vote. Like, Teal certainly is not a friend to democracy. And so when I think when you see a lot of anti-democratic movements or currents going through our society and through politics worldwide, you know, rise of the global far right and far right populism, Thiel is of a piece with this. He is a far right industrialist, deeply connected to the security state, deeply politically connected, billionaire, basically has a set of beliefs out of the fascist playbook. What differentiates him in some ways is

that, you know, he's a tech guy. And instead of being an Italian futurist or something in the 1920s, you know, he's a surveillance contractor for the CIA. But I think it's important to kind of recognize what he represents, and also what some of his colleagues and people who are very like-minded, they may not have exactly the same priorities or be as openly far right. But I think they're both in this whole milieu of reactionary tech guys and reactionary PayPal mafia people are part of the general right-wing anti-democratic drift that you see going through US society, certainly, and predicate on this larger disenchantment with liberalism and the sense that both parties are corrupt, which again, is true.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think the Ukraine issue is like a whole other conversation, really. I started my article about Sachs, like, over the summer. I mean, he may have been talking about Ukraine, but I think some people sort of accused me even, like Glenn Greenwald did, though, of course, he didn't name me, But I'm sort of like, this is a liberal establishment who loves war now, you know, trying to shut sacks up or something. But like, my article is actually barely mentioned Ukraine or foreign policy, because I think actually, it's pretty neatly summarized. It was much more about this political domestic influence and where the money is going domestically. I also think Ukraine can be really hard to talk about because, I mean, I'm a leftist who's pro-diplomacy and is uncomfortable about U.S. involvement, but I wouldn't say my position is the same as someone like Sachs who wants to give over Crimea and their other differences. But again, there is sort of a kernel of truth, even in the Ukraine stuff or in their disenchantment with government domestically. And that's why you do see some of this catching

on a little bit. People have a right to be very frustrated with the status quo and not see a lot of political way forward. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there was the letter the other day from the Progressive Caucus, I think it's called, in the United States saying that we need a more diplomatic approach toward Russia and Ukraine. And even the Pod Save America folks who are not radical lefties at all, you know, quite center of the road, were saying like, you know, I think that people are getting a bit too opposed to diplomacy and

just supporting, you know, Ukraine at all costs with whatever arms and weapons they want. And we need to start thinking about the implications of this. Yeah, I mean, I won't go too far down this road. But you know, it is a narrowing of the political horizon in some way to kind of bring it back. First of all, you negotiate with your enemies. That's just how the world works and how diplomacy works. But, you know, in general, we have this narrowing of the political horizon and a political possibility of the Overton window, however you want to frame it. And certainly the tendency towards constant war and also seeing this as a righteous war is part of that. And then here at home, the sense that the economy is run by oligarchs who are just funding their pet causes and their pet

politicians. Unfortunately, that has led to a lot of political disenchantment and also just straight up lack of participation. And that's just another struggle that we have to fight against, I think. Yeah. And as you say, you know, when you look at what the Democratic Party is doing and trying to close off these avenues for left-wing criticism of their policies and things like that, the only place that you tend to hear it or that you hear the most of these kind of criticisms of the way that things are operating right now is from the right, from this kind of new right, alt-right, from people like Musk and Sachs, then that draws people in in this way. There's so much seeding of territory. Yeah, totally. And, oh, one thing I wanted to refer back to also is the working class thing, actually, and like material stuff that you were mentioning earlier. Like, you see this, like sort of these ex-Democrats that appear on Fox and even some people in the Republican Party say like, Democrats have abandoned people any actual solutions. I mean, there's like the weird mix of like neonatalism and nationalism from J.D. Vance, where he's like, give people a

little more welfare and they can have more babies and women can leave the workforce. But like, there's no real comprehensive program or anything or anything really sensible from the right to improve people's economic lot, their material condition. Of course, we've gone through two plus years of pandemic with no movement towards universal health care, like nothing that's going to move the needle for people. But at least that lip service, which isn't nothing, is being paid by Republicans. disconnect from how people are struggling and the continued wealth gap in this country and any effort to actually speak to that beyond, you know, a few token people in Congress and the Senate. Yeah, it's very concerning, right? And especially if we're already seeing this drift toward the right, because, you know, they're the ones who are trying to dominate this issue. And certainly when you have Fox News and a whole right wing media infrastructure that ensures that people only hear a lot of these right wing folks talking about these issues, then it draws people more in that direction. I want to pick up on a couple final things to start to close off our conversation.

We were talking about Thiel. We were talking about these tech billionaires who are increasingly getting involved in politics, in the political system. I think that there's something quite interesting that for a long time, the narrative of Silicon Valley was very much like, keep the government away from us. Let us do our innovation, unleash our tech products on the world. This is how we make the world a better place by entrepreneurialism, innovation, tech development, not by having the state get involved in things. And now more and more as these people have become really powerful, as they become really wealthy, you know, certainly we've talked about Musk and Sachs and Thiel, but also Andreessen's It's Time to Build essay is all about Silicon Valley kind of showing its power a bit more,

trying to influence society even more. There seems to be a greater desire by these people to unleash their wealth in such a way to further shape the political system to serve their ends, their needs, their desires, when it really was already, in a sense, oriented toward them anyway. So it seems quite a concerning development. Yeah, I mean, there is a self-sustaining aspect to greed and being a billionaire, like you want it all. And that's how you got to where you are. I mean, the libertarian phase of tech may have always been a little bit of red herring or sort of temporary, not quite what we thought it was. I mean, I am a believer in the Californian ideology is sort of like the arc

that a lot of tech has followed. But you're right, like, the libertarian stuff is in a lot of ways been dispensed with, I mean, they still want some kind of personal freedom, and it's certainly embodied in crypto and Bitcoin. But they don't mind the government in certain forms, there's a lot of money in working for the government. And I don't need to recapitulate the whole narrative history of how the government gave rise to Silicon Valley and Musk has benefited enormously from government contracts and incentives with Tesla and SpaceX.

So Thiel's obviously a huge government contractor, even as he sort of wants to either overthrow the state or reconfigure it in his image. So it really is about, you know, asking not just what they're saying, but how is power operating? You know, where are their contracts? Where's the money going? Where are they getting money from? And, you know, another sort of smaller example might be someone like Palmer Luckey, actually created the Oculus and sold to Facebook, really young guy considering innovator Teal Fellow, and is sort of libertarian, or at least

right wing in some way. But now his new thing is a defense tech company. He basically builds border tech and sells drones and stuff to the border police. I think he's actually a representative figure, Palmer Luckey, and his sister happens to be married to Matt Gaetz. He has political connections. He's close with Teal. That to me is more the developing archetype, I think. And maybe it's the precedence in Thiel, maybe it's in Howard Hughes, but is someone who is of the right, who perhaps has a little bit of social liberalism or libertarian attitudes, you know, they don't care if you smoke weed, but they don't mind working closely with the security state and benefiting from government contracts. I mean, Microsoft has used contracts with the government at this point. And given that we kind of work in a pay to play

political society, it only follows that eventually they're going to start paying politicians and try to start shaping the laws. I mean, the Koch brothers who are libertarians of a type, one of them is dead now, they've been shaping legislation to their interest for decades. And in some ways, this is almost the opportunity or window for some of these tech guys to assume that Koch brothers type dark money, oligarchic position. I kind of hope no one ever occupies that position. But that's what I think a larger trend I see now is that you have people like Thiel and even Sachs and others ascending to that role and are playing key roles like Palmer Lucky. And the relationship to the state is far from libertarian. It's certainly like, well, the state helps me and funds my research and pays my bills and gives me billion-dollar contracts to

build weapons. And also, of course, fulfills this nationalist instinct that a lot of them feel. You know, some of them might claim to be anti-war or not want to get involved in Ukraine, but they're deeply nationalists, a lot of these folks. And again, in that sort of classic John Birch sense of, and the America First sense, which really does trace back to the John Birch society in the forties and America first and all that. So it's important that we can't just call them, you know, blanket libertarians or something like that. You have to see how they are instruments of the right and of the right wing state or, or shapers of it now. And, um, freedom for them means something very different, I think, than freedom for you or me. It also makes me feel like, you know, we often talk about the tech industry as though this

libertarian phase kind of defines what it is and where it comes from, right? But I feel like increasingly, we need to look back to that earlier stage before the libertarian turn of the industry, when it's very much, you know, a state contractor, it's very conservative, to almost see a relationship to what is going on now. Because that libertarian phase happens in a moment when the United States is hegemonic, doesn't really have a, you know, the Soviet Union still exists for part of it, but is not the kind of rival that it previously was earlier in the Cold War. And, you know, we're now entering this period where the United States weren't benefiting from it because they were libertarians and blah, blah, blah, are now really cozying up to the American government in a way that they hadn't in the past

because there's this threat from China. There's the growing threat of there are these big monopolies, these major firms that are having more and more kind of scrutiny paid toward them. And so if you get close to the government again, if you buy into the nationalist rhetoric and even echo it, that is also beneficial for those companies because they're going to get the public subsidies, the public funding, like the CHIPS Act recently, the restrictions that have been put in against Chinese tech to try to preserve American tech and their markets and things like that. But then it also benefits them to buy into this whole narrative, to buy into this adversarial relationship that exists and to get a closer relationship to the government. I believe the Secretary of State

was even in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago to talk to a lot of these companies. So I think this is where we're headed, right? Yeah. those Silicon Valley trips have become standard. I mean, I joked the other day on Twitter, I was just muttering things to myself. And I was like, we live in Eric Schmidt's world, which is kind of like, you know, that fusion of defense, intelligence and Silicon Valley, in a lot of ways has come to pass. And it doesn't really matter whether sensible liberals are in charge at Google, or, you know, right wing liberals are in charge at Google or, you know, right wingers are in charge at venture capital companies or wherever else like Peter Thiel. In practice, they share a lot of the same ideology.

I do think that the adversarial relationship with China is certainly it's complex and you can see how it's why it's happening, but it is very unfortunate. And a lot of it I find is sort of useless or kind of bombastic in a way that I don't really see what the point is. Like, what does it mean we're going to beat them in quantum computing or we have to beat them in AI? I don't really know. I mean, the CHIPS Act I don't really like because it seems like a subsidy, but at the same time, like, I do want to build things here, as I talked to you about earlier. And like, I would like the next TSMC to be in the US so we don't have to go to war over Taiwan.

But even that framing is sort of a right-wing framing. I would think there's some version of multilateral cooperation that's possible and remaining a democracy ourselves and not just like slipping into illiberalism and nationalism and kind of anti-China xenophobia. But that really is kind of where we're headed. And even in a soft way with a lot of the

tech industry that, yeah, there's two sides of the fence, and they've chosen to line up next to the US for both reasons of self preservation and profit. It's certainly the case that a lot of these people who worked in government now, of course, there's a big revolving door. You know, there's a lot of security state type people, a lot of policy people of both parties who are now working in Silicon Valley. So I think even as the political landscape has changed with Trumpism and this sort of seeming ascendance of the right wing, maybe the correct thing to say is that by default, this is sort of the uncomfortable place where we've ended up at. You know, there are hardly even any independent tech companies of any reasonable size. Like how many Mozilla's are out there or even something like Spotify, which is obviously Swedish and things like that. But we've just been so consolidated on sort of where political authority is wielded, where monetary and business authority is wielded that, that again, brings us back to this place where there's nothing that you or I can do, it seems like, except perhaps, you know,

fall in love with a charismatic right wing huckster on TV. I think that's a really good point. I think, unfortunately, it leaves us in a pretty kind of terrible place when we're looking at the future and where things are going. But this show isn't about being unnecessarily optimistic. It's about looking at how things actually are and the terrible ways that the tech industry is affecting society and the world. So, Jacob, I really appreciate this conversation. I'd highly recommend people go read the pieces that we are talking about in The Baffler and The New Republic, which will be linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for taking the time. And of course, very much looking forward to your new book coming out next year and highly recommend people go preorder that. Thanks so much.

Thanks. Always a pleasure. I really like it. he's also a journalist who writes for a number of different publications you can follow jacob on twitter at at silverman jacob you can follow me at at paris marks and you can follow the show at tech won't save us tech won't save us is produced by eric wickham and is part of the harbinger media network and if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter thanks for listening. Thank you.